Making your own Wedding Cake

We had 4 cakes at our wedding. FOUR. My husband was convinced that we wouldn't have enough dessert otherwise and that people would think it was tacky. 

I am by no means a professional baker, but I made my own wedding cake. I like making birthday cakes and chocolate chip cookies. But somewhere early on in the wedding planning process, I got caught up in pretty Pinterest pictures and decided that I could definitely make my own wedding cake, as long as I kept things simple.

It's not just the photo - that cake is tilted.

 I also live in France, meaning there is only one shop in town that makes American-style wedding cakes and they are super expensive - about $900 for 3 tiers and 100 parts. This is before you start adding decorations like ribbon, flowers, etc. They aren't terrible, but they also aren't nearly as pretty as you would see in a real America cake shop. Moreover, just to complicate things further, apparently they are dry and don't taste very good. That just wasn't going to work for me.

A few months before the wedding, a lot of our friends and acquaintances kept mentioning how they couldn't wait to go to a French-American wedding and see a real live wedding cake. I ended up being some what obligated.

Now, you should know that French wedding cakes are delicious, but notoriously ugly. Here's a picture of the traditional French wedding cake we had at our wedding.

It's basically a tower of cream puffs covered with caramel. Yummy? YES! Pretty? Not so much...

We also had a Macaroon Wedding Cake. It looked like this:

Do I recommend making your own Wedding Cake?

Good heavens, no. It was a nightmare. I was in tears every single day the last two weeks before our wedding because making a 4 tier cake is not as easy as it looks on Pinterest. The guest's were thrilled to see a real-live American wedding cake ("Just like in the movies), but it wasn't worth the psychological toll. This was definitely my biggest DIY regret for the wedding.